1. Field of Art
The present invention relates to the field of mobile communications and more specifically to using mobile text messaging for interaction between merchants and customers or potential customers of a business.
2. Description of the Related Art
In commerce, merchants seek to maintain contact with their frequently visiting customers because such customers drive sales. In many instances merchants drive revenue higher by encouraging existing customers to visit and shop with them more often. In order to drive their existing customers to their location, merchants use several techniques. For example, some merchants encourage customers to drop their visiting or business cards at the store. Merchants could then build lists using these visiting or business cards to maintain a list of loyal customers and push promotions to them. A problem with this approach is that merchants do not have real-time interaction with their customers and must expend time and money resources to enter in the received data on the visiting or business cards. Moreover, such approaches are prone to data entry errors due to their highly manual process.
Other approaches to help drive traffic to merchant stores revolve around processes that induce customers to receive emails of offers, promotions, events and the like. However, these processes require that the user volunteer and share their email with the merchant or an agent for the merchant, which often leads to privacy concerns on the part of the customer. Moreover, email systems generally are not real time, and thus, the opportunity to immediately interact with a customer often is a lost opportunity for the merchant.
Thus, the present state of the art lacks, inter alia, a system and process for immediate electronic communication between a merchant and a customer that allows for a customer to immediately opt-in to receive additional opportunities for commerce related interactions with a merchant.